Fly.io

No free tier anymore — and that is the headline change

If a tutorial tells you Fly.io has a free allowance, it is out of date. Fly deprecated the old free plan that included ongoing VM and bandwidth allowances. New accounts now get only a short free trial (roughly a couple of VM-hours or 7 days); after that it is pure pay-as-you-go with no fixed monthly minimum — you pay for exactly what you provision. This single change makes much of the older "free hosting" advice about Fly.io wrong.

Practical implications

• Fly runs full Firecracker micro-VMs, not edge isolates — you get a real machine, persistent volumes, and support for non-HTTP protocols (good for databases, game servers, custom TCP).
• Multi-region deployment with Anycast is a genuine strength: put compute physically near users in 30+ regions.
• Operating Fly well assumes comfort with its CLI and a slightly more infra-oriented mental model than Render or Railway.

When to choose it

Choose Fly.io for stateful, multi-region, or protocol-flexible workloads where physical proximity matters. If you just want the simplest "git push and it runs" with a free tier, Render is gentler; for usage-based simplicity, Railway.